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Pushing Petals Up and Down Park Ave.

Left, Will Ryman with one of his flowers, made from fiberglass and stainless steel. Right, a digital rendering of one of the works from Will Ryman’s “Roses,” the piece will sit at 59th Street and Park. The project will be unveiled on Jan. 25th.Credit
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times. Right, WR Studio Inc./Paul Kasmin Gallery

THE first sign of spring this year in New York may be the work of Will Ryman, whose site-specific art installation, “The Roses,” will be unveiled on Jan. 25. It will cover 10 blocks of Park Avenue with an unseasonable crop of giant pink and red rose blossoms.

Those with apartments overlooking the Park Avenue Mall between 57th and 67th Streets may feel as if they’re hallucinating when they wake up to Mr. Ryman’s clusters of nearly 40 buds ranging from 5 to 10 feet in diameter, with the longest stems among them sprouting 25 feet above the street.

“I love that somebody looking out their window could be experiencing an object one way, while someone standing on the sidewalk could be looking at the same object and having a totally different experience,” Mr. Ryman, 41, said during a recent visit to his loft on the Bowery. “If you look at the stems, they’re sort of dancing.”

A fanciful riff on a Park Avenue tradition of displaying seasonal flowers and ornamental trees, “The Roses,” which will remain on display through May 31 and take a weekend to install, appears undeniably whimsical. It even includes 20 oversize petals to be scattered along the ground, 6 of which have been comfort tested to double as lawn chairs.

Still, anyone tempted to dismiss “The Roses” as fluff may need to look closer. Between the 1-to-2-foot beetles, bees, ladybugs and aphids peeking out of these particular flowers, and the thorns the size of dinosaurs’ teeth protruding from the blossoms’ curving stems, Mr. Ryman aims to stir a sense of foreboding that will contrast with the project’s more obvious feel-good symbolism.

His works have already generated a double-edged impression. In a review in The New York Times in 2004 Ken Johnson wrote that Mr. Ryman’s work “has a genuinely cathartic feeling about it, as though he has indeed finally allowed long-neglected feelings to come out from the shadier corners of his psyche.”

Photo

Two photographs from the workshop where the pieces are being created.Credit
Iwan Baan

The opening sequence of the David Lynch film “Blue Velvet” is an inspiration for Mr. Ryman’s new installation. “At first, there’s this house with a white picket fence, this perfect world,” Mr. Ryman said of the film. “But then the camera pans from a cheerful bed of roses to a churning, bug-filled underworld that is primal, menacing and, I think, ultimately the truth.”

In their exaggerated scale “The Roses,” which are fiberglass and stainless steel, evokes the Pop sculptures of Claes Oldenburg. Their surfaces, which are individually painted, tend to be bumpy and irregular and underscore Mr. Ryman’s reaction against the slicker works of artists like Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami. (“For me, unless the hand is present, humanity is absent from the piece,” he said.) But in their cartoonish display of human expectation and failure, they also owe a powerful debt to Mr. Ryman’s lingering fascination with absurdist theater.

A Manhattan native, Mr. Ryman was born into a family of artists. (His father is the Minimalist painter Robert Ryman, and his mother, Merrill Wagner, paints abstractions on three-dimensional objects.) In a youthful attempt to buck what he jokingly referred to as “a business or a curse, depending on how you see it,” after graduating from high school he immersed himself in plays by Beckett, Sartre and Ionesco and began jotting down bits of dialogue, in the hope of establishing himself as a playwright.

While he worked a series of odd jobs, as a script reader, a prep chef and later a line cook, he “really wanted to make some noise as a playwright,” he said. “I thought that was my destiny.”

After struggling “very profoundly for years,” however, he said that by the age of 32 he had to accept that “my plays weren’t really commercial, as much as I wanted them to be.”

His realization led to a shift in materials. Instead of scribbling scenes in his journals — towering stacks of which cluttered his desk at his loft, bearing witness to the magnitude of his efforts — he resolved to make sculptures of his characters, the better to envision them more fully.

In a cramped studio apartment, measuring roughly 600 square feet, he said, “I basically took apart my bookshelves and my coat tree and got some papier-mâché and built a hundred or so figures about four feet tall.”

“I wanted to invent a new kind of theater,” he added, “in which actors were removed, and props somehow told the story.” In 2002 he moved into his current loft with the goal of turning it into a theater. After constructing nine scenarios with what he called his “crazy, disturbed figures,” he invited people he knew from the theater and film world to see his bizarre, nonnarrative production.

As luck would have it, one of Mr. Ryman’s friends happened to bring the art dealer Tanja Grunert, who surprised him by proposing that he feature his dejected-looking characters in a solo show at her gallery in Chelsea.

Like a wry comment on his father’s pared-down paintings, which gravitate heavily toward white, Mr. Ryman’s “Pit,” exhibited at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert in the summer of 2004, presented a white space the size of a room with an exterior staircase leading up to a platform. From there viewers were invited to peer into a gloomy hollow, painted entirely black, from which a hundred or so childlike figures in tennis shoes gazed up plaintively.

In “Wall Street,” a subsequent installation from 2008 at 7 World Trade Center, Mr. Ryman presented some 15 characters ranging from three-inch-tall businessmen to figures like a homeless man sifting through trash and a hot dog vendor that rose nearly to 15 feet in height.

Mr. Ryman’s dramatic scale shifts persist. And while roses present a departure from his previous works in their replacement of the human figure, Mr. Ryman said he’ll rely upon Park Avenue residents and passers-by “to complete my piece.”

After all, as Adrian Benepe, New York’s parks and recreation commissioner, who organized “The Roses” with the sculpture committee of the Fund for Park Avenue, said, “A giant rose gets you thinking about public spaces in the city and your relationship to them.” (Paul Kasmin Gallery also supported the project.)

“Plus,” he added, “it’s a touch of color in the winter.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 16, 2011, on page AR21 of the New York edition with the headline: Pushing Petals Up and Down Park Ave. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe